Removing hundreds of pounds of plastic at West Palm Beach

I'm Alex with 4ocean and today we're going to be cleaning up plastic from an island, crawling through the mangroves to get plastic water bottles, and we even see a ton of manatees. It's going to be a great day guys. Let's do it. Then you guys are all ready to rock and roll. We'll talk to you shortly. We are up in West Palm right now and this is Jim Barry boat ramp that we just launched from. So this is right across from Peanut Island. So West Palm is a very beautiful place. What we're going to do is we're going to go check out some of these barrier islands, some of these inlets and different areas where plastic tends to accumulate and see what we can find. There's actually a, right behind those bars, there's a big floating building type structure and I honestly really wanted to make that our office. I wanted to try and buy that and make it our HQ and then we would just all go out, go by boat and just work on it. It's like a 4,000 square foot thing. You can see it on their eyes. It's like three stories. It's got like, you know, bathrooms, the whole nine, three story thingy thing, big floating dock. I was like, that'd be a pretty cool office. So right here behind me is Peanut Island and this island is actually maintained so you can like see the garbage cans that are out there. So they have people that literally walk the beach and maintain it. So this area tends to be pretty clean, but the areas that we're going to find are actually further down in the inlet here where there's going to be a lot of accumulation of plastic in the small little coves and little beaches. A little bit of debris up there. Yeah, there's a lot of models. You can see it washed up in there. One of the hardest parts about running 4ocean is I'm always constantly pulled between being able to do cleanups and also the administrative, like running the business and coordinating with the team. So one of my goals for this year has been to be more accessible but not have it interfere with cleanup operations. So what I've done is I've got my iPad and now I've built this little mount right here on the t-top. And so the idea is that anytime that I have meetings before, historically I would be like, oh I got a meeting in the middle of the day, I can't go on a cleanup today. But now with this type of setup, I've got a little video call here, I got a mount that I'm going to set up for here, and now be able to take a quick meeting in between cleaning sessions. So it doesn't limit the ability to get out there, get after it, clean some plastic, but still stay connected with partners, stay connected with the team, and keep everything moving. This is a standard little RAM mount. This is an adjustable Armor X iPad mount. You just screw on there. Look at that, huh? This is so cool, dude. That is awesome. Oh, we're gonna jump on. Let's do one of the first ones. Hey, me. Live from the water. Yes, dude. It works. Everything is working. Yes, Alex. Yes, Heidi. Thank you so much for the background. Definitely, we're in this together and looking forward to having you guys help us kick some butt, clean some more trash out of the ocean. All right, guys. Have a great week. See you later. All right, dude. That was sick. First time taking a meeting from the boat, but now can get right to cleaning. No downtime. So we've got a ton of plastic, actually, as you see on this side. We've got buoys. We've got stuff up in the mangroves. A lot of plastic just along the shoreline. So gonna get the gloves, gonna get some of our buckets and get our gear. Let's get after it. So for these cleanups, I like to just bring a bucket. Five-gallon buckets are easy for just putting all the debris in. When you got buoys and things like that, you can fill up the buckets with the bags and all sorts of plastic. It's just easier. Then I dump these into the bigger bin. So these thin bags, these are like your shopping bag. So they're number four LDPE, which is low-density polyethylene. And so these bags, a lot of the times, get mistaken for jellyfish. One of the staple diets of sea turtles is jellyfish. So a lot of them are ingesting these when they're floating in the ocean, but you also see them get wrapped around all sorts of mangroves and roots like that. Look at this. Oh, there's like a whole family in here, dude. Oh, there's one. He's out. There's one. Oh, there he goes. There he goes. Oh, he's cold. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it's cold right now. So it's like, you know, I think 42 degrees at night. So that's why these little baby lizards are moving slow, but no, no eggs in here, nothing, but we got to clean this up because this is just going to fall apart and just cause all sorts of mayhem. So this is just a trash bag that was floating. You're seeing a lot. What I'm doing right now is pulling all the sand out of these because we don't want that extra weight. We don't want all the unnecessary stuff, but all of this debris is typically getting washed up with the tides and then the wave action. And so it's filling these up with sand and then they start breaking down and that's what's going to turn into a bunch of little pieces of microplastic and all sorts of stuff. So we want to clean them, get it out of here, and keep this place clean. This side of the boat, the little beach area, is pretty clean. At least now it is. A lot of bags, a lot of bottles, a lot of styrofoam, and a lot of people wonder how the trash gets here. Like why is all this stuff ending up in the ocean? And I inherently don't think that people intentionally throw plastic. I know it does happen occasionally, but I think most of this is just stuff that ends up blowing in the water or washing in from, you know, falling off boats and things like that. But, you know, for the most part, most of this stuff really doesn't... I don't think people are deliberately throwing it into the ocean. But this side of the boat is pretty clean. Now let's go to the other side. Flamin' hot Cheetos. Got a Gatorade bottle. We've got some Modelo. Oh, I got one. Target acquired. Modelo. Modelo! There we go. Okay guys, we got some wildlife. We have a huge iguana up here. Check this out. So we got some type of piece of metal. Oh wow. I either need a shovel or we got to hook the boat up, tie a line to it, and just get some pressure on it trying to pull this thing out. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm not going to use the boat to tow it, but I'm going to bring the boat right alongside, use the saltwater wash down pump, and we're going to try to see if we can pull this thing out. Give me one second. Hold please. It really just keeps going. Okay, we're getting some movement. All right, this thing's kicking my ass. All right, let's go. We tried. I'm accepting the loss on this one. So right here, this is the giant piece of metal buried in. I used the bow of the boat coming over, saltwater wash down, trying to rinse it out, but this thing is like 20 feet deep. Nah, it's exaggerated, but it's hard. I'm taking a loss. We're going to have to come back with better tools, better equipment, and we'll get it next time. So the first spot, we got about a third of a bin filled. So that's a good amount of plastic, mostly bottles. You can see a ton of plastic water bottles for the most part, some random debris, some ropes and lines and things like that, but let's go to the next spot now. Peanut Island's looking pretty clean. So I know I said earlier that they maintain, but where we were at was the intertidal zone. So the intertidal zone is anywhere where low tide and high tide, the level of water reaches. Right now it's dead low tide and incoming. So normally that beach that we are on is not typically exposed. And if you saw it was down the dunes, so it's not necessarily somewhere where tourism or tourists or a lot of people are going to visit or the people on the island being able to see that trash coming in. Most of the trash that comes in is coming from the Gulf Stream offshore, coming in here, washing up on these shorelines. And so that will probably reaccumulate very quickly. So that's a spot that we always check just to grab anything that's there. So we're right by Manatee Lagoon. And what it is is there's a power plant here that uses seawater to cool down their systems. And then that warm water comes out into this little bay over here. And that's where a ton of manatees accumulate. So you can see all the people up on the railing. They're looking over into this little small area, which see those pipes over by the wall. That's where the warm water is coming out into that little bay. And you're going to see a bunch of manatees in there. So let's go check them out and see if we can see ourselves some baby manatees. So right up by Manatee Lagoon here we've got some type of trash, but I'm not going to lie, it looks like it's another thing buried halfway under. Looks like a big bucket or a jug. So let's give it a little college try, am I right? What do we got? It's a cushion. So this was a beach cushion. As you can see when they collect all the sand and the mud, the water, they weigh a few hundred pounds. But you got to separate them and put them into small pieces so they're easily manageable. Now I'm just going to put these over the rocks. That way I can, I'm sorry, over the creek, let all that water drain out. Maybe it doesn't drain out, but oh man. Cool man, cool. Okay, so this was a cushion from like a beach chair, right? Like a lounge chair. So that outer cushion, the outer like shell of this is like a, I believe a type of vinyl, but that's just going to slowly start breaking down. And then you've got the foam. And so the foam is a part of the chair that's soaking up all the water, that's soaking up all the sand. And all of this little foam is just going to slowly break down. Right now it's not in that bad a condition, but as it sits out here in the sun, the UV degradation starts breaking it down. That's when it'll start to turn into microplastics. So that's why we cut all these things out, trying to get everything out of here and try and get out of the beach and out of the bundle. This is insane. There's so much plastic film here. Dude, I have like a full, full bucket basically of plastic bags. Yeah, I got a shoe. Wow. It's a full thing of plastic bags. Still not all done, but it's crazy. Almost an entire bucket of just the, the plastic bags. But now it's time to go in here deep because look at all this stuff. Wow. Let's get in here and get after it. Oh my God. Look at this. It's a literal roll of plastic wrap. I thought this was a candle. It's a roll of plastic wrap. My good Lord. That's the source. They say, stop it at the source. That's the source right there. Oh my gosh, dude, that's insane. Got ourselves a little deck hatch solid. So up in the mangroves, you can see the accumulation of floating debris. So right now you've got a big pile of plastic water bottles. It's because when the tide comes up, they all get pushed up into this area. And then the mangroves act like a traps and they hold all this debris in here. I think we just got as much as we can get the last bit of this plastic wrap deep in the jungle today. Hang a lot. Back's feeling a little warm right there. So this coastline is pretty clean. Got a bunch of stuff, cushions, mats, boat hatches, and a crazy amount of plastic film. That was just insane. Is filming it and able to show people in the world and all of you guys exactly what we're doing out here. So you've got to kind of get good and find the tips and tricks. So this is the DJI Mini 4 and I've got it on spot block just filming us. So right now we're just cruising and I can stay focused driving the boat. I'm not even worried about the drone at all, but I got to tell you, look at that skiff, man. That is just a beautiful, beautiful little boat. Carolina skiff. Got to love them. Big shout out to them. This is an amazing cleanup vessel. Carry a ton of weight, floats shallow, helps us to keep the ocean clean. Look at all the plastic and debris. Solid day. All right, guys, we've been checking out the different areas. We've been cleaning up a ton of plastic, but this wind is picking up and the weather's going to start getting nasty. So we're going to head back to the shop and get all this plastic sorted. She's getting windy, y'all. She's getting windy. So back on this marker, there's a bunch of fishing line hanging off and most likely a lure on that. So we're going to snag that because that is most of the time where birds get entangled in line. Cleaning the ocean is hard work, I got to tell you. If you're going to be out here, you got to be good. If you're going to be done, you got to be tough. So this is a line, the brand, but it's basically a braid and the braid fishing line is made of plastic. So what this is, is it's made to, it's a great tool for fishing because there's no stretch in monofilament fishing line. That's the clear fishing line you see. There's a lot of stretch in that. So a lot of people use braid because braid is very strong, very tough. The diameter is much smaller than monofilament, but the problem with it is it lasts forever. So this stuff, just like you see here, someone's probably casting off the dock, clipped the sign, and now you had all this out there with, you know, probably 50, 60, 100 feet of line. And that's where you get birds that are swimming, swimming by or flying by, landing on this. They'll get caught up and then bad news bears. So if you ever get your stuff stuck, always, always, always go and try and get all that line out of there. So now we just have to secure everything. So what we're going to do is get the lids on, get the trash cans, all secured down, ratchet strap, hit the highway and head back to the shop. That's not going anywhere. So these are the boat buckles. So I don't know if you guys have seen any of the other videos. I hate using the ratchet straps from like the home improvement store. They always rust, they're falling apart. So these are boat buckles. They're stainless steel, retractable, auto-retractable. What you can do is just go right there. Now you can grab one from the other side, right here, grab this one, go through the handle, hook these guys together. See, it keeps tension on it. Most of the other ratchet straps, they fall. The other hook falls off. It's a nightmare, but now you can keep tension on that. This guy stays. And then you go down under here and I mounted it straight to the aluminum plate from the seat. And then you just go and start engaging. Then you go on this side, same thing. Boom. We're solid. All stainless steel mounted to the aluminum plate. You're good to go. Boat buckles, check them out. We're back at the Porsche shop and now it's time to weigh all this trash. So we've got our trash tracker documentation station. So I'm going to drag these guys in and we're going to get a weight. The one thing that I want to call out is that these cushions weigh a ton. I'm going to bring one in and show you what just one of them weighs because it's filled with water, but we're going to let those sit out and dry out. And that way we can get a true weight on it and it's not waterlogged. But let's take this trash can in and our hatch, we'll get a solid weight on it. Okay. So for anybody that hasn't seen this process before, we track all of the cleanups that we do. We're able to take photos before, during, and after to show you all the pounds that are collected. We then take them back here where they get all weighed individually. So here we have the date, the time spent cleaning, area clean, lead captain and crew members, and the vessel number. Then what we do with this scale is we're going to take photos of the bins on here where you can actually see the plastic and what's inside of it. So I'm going to walk you through that in a sec. We're turning on our scale, let her fire up. She's going to get set up. And what's going to happen, you're going to notice on here is that this is at zero pounds. So the reason why it's at zero pounds now is because we have this, we've teared it to zero. So that's why we say a confirmed scale is teared to zero pounds with an empty bin prior to weight. So what we want to do is we don't want to have to pour all that trash into this. That's like, that's not efficient. So you can pull off an empty bin, which weighs about 15 and a half pounds, and we're going to put on the bin that we collected. And that's going to give us our weight for the day, at least what's in this bin. All right, that's intense. I definitely broke a hundred pounds with all the other stuff. So now we're at 93 and a half. So there's four of these cushions. So I'm just going to show you the impact if we just did keep the waterlogged stuff on it. So 93 to 140, so that's 50 pounds right there. So those four cushions is almost like 200 pounds, but a lot of it is water weight. So we're going to let this dry out in the sun, but we can measure our boat hatch. Boat hatch will count. So 115. All right, baby. And then whatever we have in the cushions, once those dry out, that'll give us our weight. I imagine probably 130, 140 pounds, maybe 150, but that was a solid little haul. So what we're going to do now is get the boat cleaned up, get all the gear put away and get her back in the shop. Let's get it cleaned. Flush your motors if you want them to last. All right, guys, the boat is clean. All the gear is washed. Everything is taken care of. That was a solid day cleaning up some plastic. It's basically the end of the day. It's getting super cold out right now. We've got a cold front coming and we are going to sort all of this trash tomorrow to pull all the recyclable plastics out of it. But thank you guys so much for watching. If you can subscribe to the channel, let us know what you want to see, what type of cleanups you want us to get out there and get after. Leave us a comment. Just let us know. We'd love to hear your guys' thoughts, but either way, thanks so much for watching. Make sure you like, hit that notification bell, and we'll see you guys in the next one. Cheers.